3. 27. Identify use cases for custom connectors
Now, it is possible that there is no connector for what you actually want. So you have a data source that is not one of these several hundred connectors. Well, you can write a custom connector. Now, this is complicated, and we don’t actually need to go into the complexity in this course. You can, however, create it using GitHub, open APIs, and Postman.
Or you can start from scratch. Microsoft also recommends, if you want to create a public API, that you might want to start from the Azure service. So using Azure functions, Azure webapps, or Azure API apps So however you do this, you create your custom connector. API means application programming interface. So you create it, you build it, and then you need to secure it. So you’ll need to use some sort of authentication. So this could be a username and password, or it could be something a bit more advanced, like your Active Directory, Dropbox, or things like that. So once you have got your API, you need to describe it, define it, use it in your power apps, and then test how well it works. Does it work correctly? Do you need to refine it? Once you’ve done that, then you can give it to other people. Now, there are two scenarios. First of all, you may want to use your connector with other people in your organization. So this is sharing your connector. It is simple and free to say I want to invite others to use this connector. However, if you want to allow other people outside your organisation to do this and use your connector, then you would need to submit it for official Microsoft certification.
Now it is free, but without this certification, which Microsoft will review and then approve if it meets its requirements, you will not be able to allow your connector to be used publicly. So you can certify for free. You can integrate it then, and it will be one of Microsoft’s official connectors once it is done. But there is a process for doing this, even though it’s a free process. So connectors, including custom connectors, can be used where one of the 200 or so connectors in the Power App Service is not applicable. It does require development; it does require somebody to actually know about APIs. But once it has been created, you can use it in your own apps, you can use it in your organization’s apps, and if you submit it for Microsoft certification, you can publish it.
4. 53. Describe the customer journey
In this video, we’ll build another canvas app and do something that the exam requires: describe the customer journey. So I’m going to create—I’m on the homepage at the moment—a new app from the Common Data service. So we’re getting things ready, and then it’s going to ask me, “Okay, what table do you want to create this from?” And I’m going to create this from the contactor contacts table, which doesn’t appear to be there. So I’ll use the search since I know it’s there. There we go. Okay, so click Connect. So getting things ready again And then the computer will have created the initial app, which you can then customise as much as you want. And here it is. So this is our app in design mode, and I’m going to click the preview, the app, and you can also see that you can press F five. So here we have the customer journey. They will see all of their contacts, and they can click on any single one of them to get it in a table-type format. They can edit it as much as they are able to. So I’ll put the number two there, but you’ll notice I’ve not allowed, or the computer has not allowed, the full name to be edited. So check or cancel any changes I’ve made. I can also delete the item as well, and I can add a new item with the plus button just here. So email “hi there,” PC, etc. number.
But you’ll see that it’s not 100% working because when I try to create it, it says that it needs a last name as well, which I don’t have visibility for, so I’ll just have to cancel that. You can also refresh the page once somebody has added something, maybe on a different version of the form. and you can also sort. So here I’m sorting in alphabetical order and then in reverse alphabetical order. So that is the customer journey. So open the form and edit it. And I think it’s useful on the left side to see how this journey happens. So we’ve got this tree view here, and inside this, we’ve got a screen. It’s an object that applies to the entire app and form. And then we have three different screens. The browse screen that you can see here, the detail screen, and the edit screen And you’ll notice that there is an error in this edit screen that says that the last name is required. And you saw there was a problem when we tried to add somebody’s contacts. So within each of these screens, we have various items. So if you look at the screen, this is the most complicated one. Each of these is not a separate item; this is just one item called a gallery.
So the gallery has got a separator, the next arrow, and the various components of body, subtitle, title, and image. And you can see at the top here that we’ve got a formula bar that says what we want displayed. So let’s say I didn’t want my business form displayed. I can replace this by saying I want something else. So see if I can get your last name. There we are. So now we have everybody’s last name instead of their phone number. So this gallery occupies most of the screen, but the actual components are just six, which repeat and repeat or repeat. And you don’t have to worry about the repetition. The computer will do all of that. So you may have seen galleries on WordPress and other things and associated them with images. Well, here in PowerApps, it’s not just images; it’s everything to do with a particular item. In addition to this, we have some other things, like, for instance, a rectangle right at the top above the gallery.
Search icons, text, a search box, and then a new button, a sort up and down button, a refresh button, the menu bar, and then a nice background. You can see in the right-hand column the properties of each of these. For example, if I wanted to change the colour of the background from blue to, say, light red, I could click inside of here and change the color. However, for this certification, you won’t have to know anything about how to actually change the properties. It’s just that if you want to experiment and say, “Well, I don’t want this right icon; instead, I want a checkmark, for instance,” you can change it fairly easily. You can see at the bottom what’s called a breadcrumb. So this shows where I am. I’m in the brow screen, I’m in the gallery, and I’m in a control called body One, so I can click backwards on the breadcrumb. So if I wanted to go back from title one to the browse gallery, I could do that. And then I can change which screen I’m looking at as well, if I so wish. In the following video, we’ll look at some of the controls available in the menu bar at the top and on the left side to help us design the user experience.
5. 52. Use controls to design the user experience
In this video, we’re going to take a look at the menus and see the controls that will help with the user experience. First of all, the home screen. So if you want a new screen, adding to the three that we’ve already got, like a success screen for when you’ve successfully edited something, then that can be done. You can see we’ve also got email people, meetings, KIND, and that sort of thing. And then, from the standard list, we can change the theme. So maybe you want a different colour theme. We can do that so it won’t override this top section because I have changed it manually, but I can change any of the others that I choose to. The rest of these are greyed out. It’s because we’re currently looking at the browse screen. If I were looking at an individual component, such as body one here, for which we now have his last name, I could change things like the font size and name of its border italic underlined, and other things similar to what we’ve got in words.
So fill and border we can also reorder. While we have got two components, one behind the other, we can bring one forward or bring it backwards. We can align controls together so that they’ve all got the same left, center, or right, or the same top, middle, or bottom. And we can also group more than one item together if we hold down the shift key. And here we can see that I have now selected free controls. We can change everything for those three controls at once, a specific item, or group them together so they are in one selection. Apart from what’s on the left side, the view doesn’t provide us with much else.
So we’ve got data media and advanced tools. So you have to wonder how much use this left side gets. So, data sources So here we have your entities or tables, the actual tables that you are using in the app, and the connector media. They allow us to upload images, videos, and audio files to use in the app. Nor more than 64 megabytes of collections, which is fairly advanced. It’s when you’re creating an old table, as you saw, with rows and columns, and you’re saying, “Here is a list of these roles and columns.” So, once again, fairly advanced variables are not required for this exam. Action. So here again, we have collections that we’re just talking about, and what happens when a screen becomes visible? What shall we do when a screen is hidden? All of these are formula-based and therefore quite advanced. So you don’t need to worry about these at all. We’ve also got a link to Power Automate, so we can bring in items called flaws from Power Automate into this Power app.
Now it’s really the insert section that I really want to talk about for the rest of this video because these are the controls that can help with the user experience. So firstly, we have got text labels and buttons. They’re so important that they are being shown standalone even though they are included in these drop-down lists. So let’s have a look at these drop-downs and just talk about them. First of all, this is text, so we have labels to allow you to show values. Text input allowed the end user to enter values sufficient for that edit screen HTML text, so you could do things like have hyperlinks in your text similar to what a rich text editor would do, and pen input for when you’re using this on a mobile device and allowing someone to draw, erase, and highlight areas on an image, so that’s text. In buttons, we’ve got things like actually creating a button that performs an action that starts something. So, for instance, I want to commit what I’m seeing on screen to my changes. That would be an icon for presentation purposes, but you can do something similar with buttons if you want to have text on it.
Then we’ve got the text and pen input, the various selection boxes, the drop-down combo, and the listbox. We’ve got a date picker, so you can choose your dates based on a calendar. We have got other ways of selecting checkboxes, radio buttons, toggles, and other things that I would call miscellaneous. So you don’t need to know the details of any of these for the PR 900 exam. You just need to know that if you want to have something that allows the user to interact with the end result, then unless it is a text input, you will find these in the input section, and you can see that text input is there as well. Gallery: So we’ve talked about what galleries are; they are repetitive things, and you can see that we can have vertical, horizontal, or ones with a bit of a flexible height. The data table allows users to display records from the data source in a table. Forms give details about your data so that you can create and edit records using forms. We have an image camera, a barcode scanner, video, audio, and it is very useful when using mobile devices. Add a picture; you can upload image files. charts give you the basic charts that you would see in Excel: column line and Pi.
But equally interestingly, I think it allows you to import PowerBI tiles. So you remember we were looking at tiles when we were creating dashboards. You could go from a report to a dashboard by pinning a tile. So you can add a Power Bi tile here. We’ve got various icons just like these check and x boxes that we’ve got here, so quite a lot of them, and you can see in the properties that we can edit them. So your first choice need not be your final choice. And the rest we needn’t look at just now; AI Builder will look at it in a later part of this course. So hopefully you can see the variety of controls that we’ve got so that you can imagine that you can get a computer to design your initial screens, so you have a display screen, an edit screen, and then maybe you want to go into more depth later. And you can do any of these and assist with how the user experiences the form using these controls. So my suggestion is that you just have a look at all of these input sections and familiarise yourself with roughly what is in each as an overall concept.
6. 47. Components
In this video, I’d like to talk about components. Now that components are a fairly advanced concept, it’s time to put them into action. There are a series of controls all packaged together. Now we get a component by going to the tree view and components and adding a new component. This brings up a new screen. There’s our component.
So now we can add any of our controls to this component. So maybe we’ll add a label at the top. So we’ll say this is my new component, then align it and maybe add a bit of colour to it as well. And we will also add in a text input. So here’s my text input. And then we will go to the icons, and we will have a checkbox and an Xbox cancel. and I’m putting them at the bottom left. Really, what I should be doing is putting them first. It seems to be the logical place in terms of designing things, but you can put it where you want. I’m just trying to show this. The answer is yes. Now, there is a big word of warning about these components. They look exactly like black boxes. So the component is something that you setup as the designer and then you give to somebody else, and they can’t touch it. It’s just like any of these controls.
I cannot go in and edit the drop-down menu beyond the properties. So if I were to go into the edit screen, for instance, and go into “insert custom,” I could add my component, and there it is. But notice the complete lack of properties compared to, say, a text input. So everything that you do in this component, which I’m having difficulty clicking, so I’ll go down here in the tree view, is entirely controlled when you create the component in the first place. So once you’ve created it, you export it. If somebody else uses it, they can’t interfere with the logic. It’s like a read-only component. Now, if I were to update my component, then makers of other power apps can be informed, and they will be allowed to update. I created something. I’ve now said I want this to be a different color, and I’ll get the message. Soandso has changed the component; do you want to update? And then I can say yes or no appropriately.
So I won’t get it because I am the originator. But if this were another app, then I’d get a message saying it’s now been updated; do you want to update? So that’s what components are, and they can go into component libraries. And as I said, you can export and import these components. Now, there is another type of component library. And this is called a component framework (or PowerApps component framework) at PCF. These are for professional app developers and designers. So what PCF components allow you to do is create cord components or components using code for both model-driven and canvas apps. So you can use HTML or CSS TypeScript files, and the way to get these is to ship them via app source. These are far more advanced. So while you’re starting to learn PowerApps, I wouldn’t personally be looking at components at all, except if somebody gave you a component that they have written and wants you to insert it into your app, in which case you can go to the tree view of components. You can insert the components, and then in the relevant screen, you can go to insert, custom, and insert your component.
7. 48. Formulas
In this video, I’d like to discuss why formulas exist. So when could you use a formula? And basically everywhere here is using formulas. So if I click on one particular item, you can see that we have a formula at the top. This item is an email.
So it’s pulling information in from elsewhere. Now, like any formula, we can edit this. So previously, I changed this one down here. So instead of using a telephone number, it was using email. So maybe I can change this to something else that relates to this item. So maybe they dress in one city; maybe I need to know what their city is. So there we have their cities: Duval, Ishukwa, Monroe, Redmond, and so forth. Maybe I don’t want all of a particular field; maybe I just want to say the second letter. If you’re used to Excel, you’ll be relieved to know that the formulas begin to resemble Excel. So we’ve arrived at midpoint. So I’m taking the second letter, starting with the second letter, and just taking one letter.
So now I’m taking two letters. So if we are using Excel-type things, we’ve got text, left, mid-right, len, and we’ve got logical tests if and not if there is an error. We’ve got date, time, extractions, year, month, date, add, date, and if. And we’ve got mathematical ideas like sum, min, round, and trigonometry, just to mention a few of the more familiar Excel formulas. So we are able to perform calculations using formulas, but what else can we do? Well, if you click on this subtitle, you can see that we’ve got a lot of properties, and these properties can be edited using formulas. Now, notice the text has a formula, but none of the others do. But I could change that. If I go to the left-hand side, you can see that all of these are clickable. So if I click on the font size, for instance, notice what happens over here—we change the size. So I can say if and when I can stay here. So, if there is something, make it 18, otherwise, make it 16.
So if I find this, this is the full name, and I go into the font size. So if full name equals Nancy Anderson sample, then make it 20, otherwise make it 18. So now that you can see that this one is a bit bigger, let’s make it 30. So you can really see the difference. So I can change the font size with formulas, and I can change any of these with formulas. Now this is called font size, but over here we have size. As a result, you may be unsure of what it is. Notice that the bolded items are the ones that have values that are different from the standard. So we had a standard color and a standard bold style. These are now different. So you can click on each of these and find out why they’re different. So let’s say I wanted to give Susanna Stop a different background color. Well, I can do that. And if I go to the size, I’ve written a conditional statement, an if statement. I can say, “If the name is one, then give me this.” If not, give me that. And so if the name is equal to SuzanneStoppod, then I think we’ll have a different color.
So you can see, formulas allow you to have individuality; they allow you to do conditional formatting. They allow other things. For instance, let’s click on the check mark, which used to be an edit symbol, I think. And you can see that this formula allows us to go into the parent. So we won’t go into detail about what this actually does in this course. But formulas allow us to modify the properties of other controls. They allow us to validate information. So we have a formula if I go into the edit screen and click on this check mark, then go to the advanced tab. Submit this formula. Now, the good news is that in this PL 900 exam, you won’t be required to actually do a single formula, but you will be required to know when formulas could be used. So hopefully, I’ve given you a few examples of when they can be used. They can be used to retrieve information. They can be used to modify the format of controls. So it could be size; it could be color. They can be used to perform calculations. So we did that when looking at the middle of this, which allows you to modify the formats of controls like we did with the font size of the backcolor, or fill, as it’s called here. It allows us to modify the properties of overcontrols and allows us to take actions. So formulas can be used when you need to add additional functionality.
8. 54. Publish and share an app
Well, well done. You have created your first app. Let’s say you want to publish the app and allow other people to do it well. First of all, you need to save it. So let’s go to the file so we can see a lot of things there. We can see that creating a new app, opening an app, your account connections and flaws, and Share take you elsewhere, returning you to this initial page. So we’re going to go instead to save. So we can also see the name in the settings the name.
So I want to call this my second app. I can give it a nice background color, I can give it an icon, and I can tell people what you can do with this app. You can also change the screen size and orientation, but I’m going to keep it in portrait, and now I’m going to save it. So here it is, my second application. It will be saved in the environment under PL 900. I can also save it to my computer if I so wish. So I’ll just click Save, and it’ll save to PowerApps. So now it is saved. I can now share it. So let’s click on “Share” either here or here. So this opens a new window. So we’re going to my apps, and it says that I have gone to apps, clicked on the app, and then clicked on Share at the top. So the first question is, “Who do you want to share it with?” Now that I don’t have any additional users in my organisation, I could go and add more, but I’m going to choose instead to share it with everyone. So this is everybody in the organization.
So what other options do you have? You could share it with users, but you can also share it with security groups if you’ve got any of those set up. If you haven’t, don’t worry too much about it. Next, what permissions do they have? So, I can’t assign roles to a tenant, but I can either say they are users, so that’s the default. So you can view and use but not change, or I can make them the core owner so I can use, edit, and share but not delete or change the owner. Now, you’ll notice that everybody, or everyone in this case, doesn’t necessarily have permission to access the data used in your app. In this case, because I’m using the data verse, the CDs, everyone will most likely have permission to use the default summary data. But if not, you need to include gateways. So gateways can add access to databases, other files, and any connectors and tables that they need access to. So you can send an email invitation to any new users automatically, and then all you have to do is click Share, and it’s shared. It’s as simple as that.
9. Revert to an earlier version
So I’ll just close this, and here I can just play it. So here are my PowerApps. And you can see the colour that I selected while it was loading and all of the changes that I’ve made. And I’m now going to go into this one, edit it, and then come back out. So there’s my new component as well. So there we go. Now, what if I decide I want to make any changes to this? Well, that’s quite easy. All I have to do is edit it. So here I am in the Power Apps, I’m in apps, and I go to edit.
So either edit button is fine. So I’m going to make one modification. I’m going to show the telephone number. So I’ve already reserved this app for editing. I’m going to override it. So I’ve got it over here, I think. So let’s just close it anyway. So eventually I will get access to this in edit mode. So I’ll just pause the video until I do. So here we are. So I need to get to the phone number. I need to work out where that is. Well, I’ve seen that before. I noticed it in the edit screen. So incidentally, I’m assuming you’ve seen we have some controls at the bottom for zooming in and out, and we can also make it full screen. But in case you haven’t seen them, there they are. So I’m going to edit this screen. I’m going to the edit screen. I’m going to click on the business font. So I’m clicking inside this box. But notice that the box itself hasn’t been selected. Instead, the container for the box has been selected.
So if I want to go into the box, I have to click again. But actually, if I look at the text, it says “parent default.” So I’d have to go out to the container anyway. So here’s my field business phone and the field name, telephone One. Okay, that’s good. So now I’m going into my browse screen, and I’m going to change this so that it is this item number one. OK, so you can see there that the change is done. So now I’m going to save this. So this is now version two. So I’m just going to click save, and it’s now saving. So there was version one, which I didn’t name. And if I click to see all versions, we get to go and see that version two has been created. So here are my applications. So I can get this by going to apps. So go to Home, go to Apps, go to your particular app, and go to details. And then we’ve got versions. We’ve also got things like connections and other things. So here is my first version one. And here we have my version two. Version one is now available. So if I go back, I’ll close all the other screens, and I will go to my second app and play. Does this have the phone number? The answer is no; it doesn’t. So version one is live. So you can save something, make some changes, and save it, but nobody gets to play with it yet. You get to test it, essentially. So let’s go back into power apps, and I’m going to want to go down to the details. So version one is live.
So I’m going to release version two right now. So publish this version so everybody can use it. So now version two is live. So let’s go out of this back-to-apps menu and go to my second app, Play. And so now we’ve got the phone number coming up. There it is. Now suddenly you realise you’ve made a massive mistake with your new version, and you want to go back to an earlier version. Okay, so let’s do that. So again, let’s go back to the details, go to versions, and we see that there are two versions, version one and version two. And version two is live. So what I’m going to do is go to Version 1, click on the dot dot dot, and click on Restore. What do you think will happen after that? You might be wrong. We’re not going to see the live button right next to version one. Instead, version one is going to be recreated as version three. So we go in, make a change, and then reverse. Then, as the most recent version, version one is copied in. Notice it’s still not live. So if I go into my apps and play, we still have the one with the telephone number. But I’ve been told we don’t want to have the telephone number; we want the previous one.
So what I do is go back into the details, go to the versions, and say that this new version three is live. I don’t get published. On this version, I get a restore. But for the very latest version, which hasn’t been shown, I get to publish this version. So I’m going to now publish Version 3. And now it is live. And if I go into the apps and have a look at it, we now see this third version, which was the first version, is now live. So you no longer have the telephone number of the second version. So when you restore something, it creates yet another version, but it doesn’t automatically publish it. So in this video, we took a look at how to share. So you have to save it first, and then you can share it. You can select permissions and share them with users and security groups. You can say, “Well, you can view and use it but not change it.” Or you can say I want to use, edit, and share but not delete or change the honor. That would be a corner. You can send emails to new users, but make sure everybody has the relevant data permissions. And then, if you find you need to go back to an earlier version, go to Apps Details, go to an earlier version in the Versions tab, and then click on Restore.
